


Sea and Sediment

by LookingForDroids



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sgrub Session, Friendship, Gen, Triple Drabble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-08
Updated: 2020-07-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:07:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25144405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LookingForDroids/pseuds/LookingForDroids
Summary: Sweeps ago, twelve trolls didn’t play a game. The opportunity is still available, and Aradia has a choice to make.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 11
Collections: Multifandom Drabble 2020





	Sea and Sediment

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aroberuka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aroberuka/gifts).



Aradia‘s sense of accumulated time is, by her reckoning, about as accurate as the best dating technology a lowblood can access. She’s learned to trust it as much as her Troll Geiger counter, and more than the stratigraphic record; centuries layer the temple floor, thick as silt, but the disc she finds when the lotus capsule opens has no age at all. It feels like it’s been waiting for her, like a chance she missed long ago. It scares her.

Aradia knows time. If she does what her ghosts are urging now, Alternia won’t have very much left of it.

.

Back in her hive, she contemplates the disc’s iridescent sheen and wonders if she wants to watch everything end. History clings to it, and she remembers that Feferi asked her something once: _Have you ever flounder anyfin from before Her Condescension’s reign?_

Feferi’s been preoccupied with battle plans lately, but Sollux keeps an encrypted channel, and sometimes she’s there to answer.

AA: i f0und s0mething 0ld  
AA: ill sh0w y0u  
AA: but   
AA: 0nly if y0u still want t0 kn0w ab0ut 0ld things i guess

_If you still care what the world is like without an Empress to rule it._

.

In another universe, sweeps ago or now, Aradia tells Sollux about a game they need to play. In this one, she meets Feferi on the shore and flies her to the temple, where the calls of croakbeasts haunt the night. Feferi runs her claws over symbols older than the Empire, wondering at their meaning, and Aradia believes, just then, in something other than inevitability. Neither of them mentions revolution until later, when they’re out under open sky.

“You really think winning against the Empire is possible?” Feferi asks.

“I don’t know,” Aradia says. “But I think I want to try.”


End file.
